Monday, March 5, 2012

Alcatel-Lucent unveiled its Photonic Service Engine (PSE), a new chip for coherent optical networking that supports data rates of 400 Gbps.

The new chip, which is being demonstrated at this week's OFC/NFOEC Conference in Los Angeles, brings substantial improvements to 100G optical coherent networks while laying the foundation for 400 Gbps line rates. The faster silicon enables far superior processing for a number of key optical functions, including coherent Tx and Rx, ultra-fast ADC/DAC, more complex modulation schemes, and new soft decision forward error correction (FEC).

Alcatel-Lucent said its 400G PSE chip can be deployed in a broad range of network configurations - from metro to regional to ultra-long haul - and transmit wavelengths over existing or new photonic lines. It is designed specifically for use in a family of line cards in the Alcatel-Lucent 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS). Specifically, the company is planning to use the PSE in a 100G muxponder card, a 100G transponder and a 100G backplane uplink. Alcatel-Lucent is also pushing ahead with a 400G line card for the 1830 Photonic Service Switch.

Alcatel-Lucent noted that its PSE was the enabling technology behind a record breaking optical transmission test performed by Deutsche Telecom’s Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs). http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

In June 2011, Alcatel-Lucent unveiled its 400 Gbps, "FP3" network processor for enabling the full stack of services over IP routers. The FP3 processor, which is scheduled to appear in Alcatel-Lucent's service router portfolio in 2012, supports 400 Gbps line rates, sufficient for handling 70,000 simultaneous High Definition video streams. It leverages 40nm process technology and represents the evolution of the company's 100 Gbps FP2 silicon, which was introduced in 2008 using 90nm process technology. It packs 288 RISC cores operating at 1 GHz. This compares with 112 cores at 840 MHz in the previous generation FP2 device. The new design uses 50% less power per bit than its predecessor.

Alcatel-Lucent describes the FP3 as an engineering achievement that will anchor the next wave in bandwidth-intensive Internet growth. In particular, the new silicon enables high densities of 10G, 40G and 100G ports on a single card. The plan is to deliver FP-3 based line cards for the 7750 SR and 7450 ESS platforms in 2-port 100GE, 6-port 40GE, and 20-port 10GE configurations in 2012. However, the flexibility of the design paves the way for other configurations, including 4x100G cards or native 400G interfaces. It also opens the door to scale routers with terabit class slots.

The FP3 also breaks new ground in that it enables the same full-services intelligence for core routers as has previously been possible at the metro or edge router.